Back when we were putting together this whole trip, a few people were surprised our first stop would be Vietnam. We’re sure many people growing up in the 60s and 70s would never have dreamed of traveling to Hanoi, Saigon, or Phnom Penh. For us today, the cities of Central Asia possess that same forbidden draw—we desperately want to go to Kabul and Islamabad. But while we hope that someday we won’t think twice about packing our bags for Afghanistan or Pakistan, for now we will have to settle for getting tantalizingly close, just across the border in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
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With Southeast Asia in the rear view mirror, we headed back to the Middle Kingdom for the third time this year. Given China’s strict policy on swine flu, our biggest concern (other than missing the flight, natch) was making it past the quarantine officers at Guilin International Airport. Unfortunately, some bad dim sum in Katie’s stomach was conspiring to make that as difficult as possible, striking at the absolute worst moment: after clearing health inspection, but before passport control. It’s a no-man’s-land with nothing but immigration forms and security officers, and no bathrooms to speak of. Katie endured bravely, though, and we make it to baggage claim without incident.
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Well, today we have fallen four weeks and many thousand kilometers behind on our blogging responsibilities. Let’s pick up where we left off: Laos. After the beating we took from Cambodia, we were eager to leave that country and our anxieties behind. So as our plane swooped low over the Mekong and the city of Luang Prabang we forced ourselves to be cautiously optimistic about the next leg of our trip. We had our near death experience (apparently a must-have for any real traveler), now we could get down to the fun part of traveling.
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Perhaps the Universe decided we needed a little humility. Perhaps Shiva felt that we just didn’t have enough destruction in our lives. Whatever the motivations of fate or the gods, we found ourselves on a speedboat racing up the Tonle Bassac toward Phnom Penh and a very rough two weeks in Cambodia. The plan was to cut a swath through the country, from the abandoned French resort towns on the Gulf of Thailand to the broad, swampy expanse around Battambang and the temples of Angkor. For the most part we were able to stick to the plan, but we encountered more than our fair share of bumps in the road along the way.
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Having had our fill of the North, we set off next to see a few spots in Central and Southern Vietnam: the old coastal city Hoi An, the city-formerly-known-as-Saigon Ho Chi Minh, and the river town Chau Doc near the Cambodian border.
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